‘What the Government Permits You to Know—That’s Not a Democracy’
“The public [has] an extreme interest in protecting the ability of people inside the government to give information without authorization.”
Ken Burns’ Vietnam War: An Object Lesson in the Failures of the Objective Lens
In striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, Ken Burns nonetheless pulls his punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war.
On Cronkite as (Belatedly) ‘Courageous Truth-Teller’
Norman Solomon has noticed (Common Dreams, 7/20/09) that “media eulogies for Walter Cronkite–including from progressive commentators–rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968.” An “obit omit” Solomon deems “essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller”: But facts are facts, and history is history–including what Cronkite actually did as TV’s […]
For the WaPo, McNamara Is the Real Victim of the Vietnam War
The Washington Post‘s editorial (7/7/09) on the death of Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara managed to outdo even the New York Times‘ victim-erasing obituary. The Times cited the number of invading troops killed by McNamara’s war of aggression while ignoring the vastly larger number of Indochinese deaths—but for the Post, neither the aggressors nor their […]
Moral Perversity and the McNamara Toll
In the sixth paragraph of his front-page obituary of Vietnam War–era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (7/7/09), the New York Times‘ Tim Weiner tries—and fails—to give some idea of the human cost of McNamara’s war: Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the […]
MSM: Pioneers in Selective Memory
Norman Solomon is unable to resist the irony (Huffington Post, 4/11/09) of a lead New York Times article titled “Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory,” inverting the futuristic character of news that scientists possibly “could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain” to look back on how “American media […]
